Christ the Cornerstone

Today's sermon...the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. 

16^th Sunday after Pentecost (Year A) – Sunday, October 2, 2011

Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, Lancaster, PA

Texts: Isaiah 5:1-7, Matthew 21:33-46

William Congreve, an English playright whose literary skill far surpasses mine, wrote in 1697 that:

Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd
Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd.

Ain't that the truth. Maybe some of us have been there, on one side of betrayal or the other. Or we know someone who has. Most of us have read, or heard, or watched enough stories of two lovers whose bond was broken by betrayal.

We just heard a story like that – a tragedy of love gone wrong, from Isaiah. We heard a “love-song” about God and his vineyard. God carefully and lovingly dug out the vineyard, cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines. God's care for the vineyard is like the care of a husband for a beloved wife. The vineyard, of course, is a symbol for the people of Israel and Judah, whom God chose out of all the nations and carefully, and lovingly, guided, protected and nourished through the centuries. Remember the promise to Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” It was like a young bridegroom's marital vow, “With all that I have, and all that I am, I honor you.” Think of the excitement of that moment. Think of the hopes for the future, hopes that the relationship will bear good fruit.

From providing children to Abraham, to meeting Moses in the desert, to leading Israel to freedom, to settling them in the promised land flowing with milk and honey, to giving the precious torah teaching, to raising up judges, then kings, then prophets to lead the people in righteousness, God had cared for his vineyard Israel and gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure it yielded fine grapes. But at every turn, greed, lust, addiction to power and faithlessness crept into Israel. Kings worshiped other gods and led the people astray. Wealth was piled up in palaces and God's people mimicked the economic injustice of other nations which God had intended them to avoid. Wild grapes were choking out the vineyard.

The fiery flames of a lover scorned began to rage. Isaiah's words are sharp. And now, he says, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? What else could I have done? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? We've seen this movie before. We know what happens next. Sparing no detail, Isaiah brings us to the tragic conclusion: And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, I will break down its wall, I will make it a waste! Carrie Underwood, singer of an epic country ballad of betrayal, would be proud of this scorned lover's revenge.

This story was so good, so compelling, that a few hundred years later Jesus decided to tell it again. In his version, we've got the vineyard, carefully laid out and protected. But Jesus has changed some of the details to fit his time and audience. This time, it isn't so much of a love story as it is a story of a business deal gone bad. In Judea in the first century, absentee landlords were a common feature of the Roman economy. They often leased their land to tenants who managed it and then gave the owners their take of the harvest. Jesus is telling this story to the chief priests and elders who have been questioning him. They know how this works. When the tenants don't pay up to the landowner, the muscle in the family comes to take care of business, if you know what I mean. Those tenants are gonna get an offer they can't refuse. But that's not what happens. Strangely, the landowner sends slaves, who the wicked tenants savagely beat, then more slaves who get the same treatment. Then comes the totally crazy part – he sends his son, vulnerable, with no protection, even after what happened with the slaves. When the son is killed, the chief priests and elders who are listening know what should happen: those wretches should be put to a miserable death! Business should get taken care of!

These are deeply human stories. Scorned lovers. Greedy, shady gangsters giving each other what's coming to them. We know these stories and we think we know how they should end. When we hear these stories, we read ourselves into them. We imagine ourselves as one of the characters. Where do you see yourself in these two stories? Are you the scorned lover getting even? Are you the wronged landowner seeing that justice is done to these truly wicked tenants? The chief priests and elders certainly thought they were. Of course, Jesus' joke was on them. They condemned themselves. Christians have often read themselves into the story as the 'other tenants' who replace the wicked Jews who did not give God the harvest he deserved. For centuries, this story has been used to justify atrocities like the Inquisition, the Crusades, torture, ghettos, and most recently, the Holocaust. Shouldn't those wicked tenants get what's coming to them?

But what if we too have fallen into the trap and condemned ourselves? Are not these works of hatred and genocide wild grapes? Are they not our works? Hasn't God cared for us like his precious vineyard, hasn't God protected us and given us life? Is not God addressing us when we hear “what more could I have done?” Brothers and sisters, we deceive ourselves if we fail to see the blood of the slaves and the son on our own hands. We are caught demanding a miserable death for ourselves.

But listen carefully to Jesus' story. God is our landowner and we are the tenants. What does God, our landowner, do? God sends no army, no band of thugs, to collect his due. God doesn't play by our rules or follow our storylines. God acts through what we call weakness. God acts foolishly. God sends vulnerable, harmless slaves to collect. God sends his precious son all alone. God is hopeful, saying “they will respect my son.” God loves us to the point of irrationality. God risks it all to win us back, to appeal to us in love. We reject God's son. We put God's son on a cross. It doesn't make any sense at all. But that's how God works.

God could have forced us to change, sure. God could have wiped out us wicked tenants. God could have uprooted his vineyard which was overgrown with sin, yielding wild grapes. But instead God came down to meet us. God sent his son Jesus Christ all the way down to walk through the muck and sin and pain and injustice and loss that we deal with every day. God hoped to create a relationship with us face to face, and we killed him, but even death could not stop God's love. The power of God's love overcame death. Jesus expresses this using the words of Psalm 118, “the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” No sin, no evil could stop God's love from reaching out to us through the grave and all, to meet us in the risen Christ.

Christ, the crucified and risen God, is the cornerstone of all creation. Christ's way of doing things, the way of the cross, the way of weakness, forgiveness and reconciliation, is the way God interacts with the world, and now it's the way we can interact with each other. In Jesus, God has directly challenged the logic of William Congreve's witty little phrase. The fury of scorned lovers and the violence of greedy businessmen is nothing next to the forgiving, reconciling, restorative power of the loving God who sent his very son in weakness to the cross and raised him to new life. Fury of a scorned lover? No more. A different English writer seems to have better captured the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ. His name is John Donne, and he writes:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. [...]
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Amen.